This “archaeological” linguistic journey reveals the idea behind essays, which is encouraging learners to examine their ideas concerning a particular topic in-depth and test them. The word “essay” derives from the Middle French word essayer, which in its turn comes from Latin exigere meaning “to test,” “examine,” and “drive out.” If you study the origin of the word, you might understand its purpose better. Note: Apart from the educational purpose, essays (also called papers or reports) are often required when applying to colleges and universities to help them select the best applicants during the admissions. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “a short piece of writing on a particular subject.”.Aldous Huxley, a famous essayist, notes that “the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything” and divides essays into personal-biographical, objectively-factual, and abstract-universal.According to Frederick Crews, professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, an essay is “a fairly brief piece of nonfiction that tries to make a point in an interesting way.”.If summarized within the academic context, the essay’s definition would be the following:Īn essay is a short nonfictional piece of formal writing assigned to students to improve their writing skills or assess their knowledge of a given subject. 1996.The are various definitions for “essay.” But here, we will focus on the meaning of this word that’s become a significant element of education in such countries as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. For example mis-taken In its wider sense word formation denotes the processes of creation of new lexical units, but it is rare that only one process occurs in one word, two or more processes can be involved in creating words.Refrences1-The need for neologisms 1996 by Ingar Roggen 2-The study of language Cambridge:CUP. Conversion this is forming a new word from an existing identical one, change in function of a verb without changing its form.įor example bottle - bottling Affixation or Derivation this is the most common word formation process it is done by adding affixes: prefixes or suffixes or infixes. To show it on an example: edit from editor.
In this nouns are usually converted into verb. For example AIDS acquired immune deficiency syndrome.Backformation this is a process in which a word changes its form and function or removing seeming affixes from existing words. Acronym or Initialisms this is a word formed from the initial letters of words in a phrase or a name in short abbreviations. The English language has included words from all over the world, France, Germany, Turkey etc.įor example café from French and yogurt from Turkish. For example e-mail (The need for neologisms) 2Loanword or Borrowing this is taking a word from one language and incorporating it into another. Coinage is particularly useful in identifying inventions, new phenomena, or old ideas which have taken on a new cultural perspective.
This word formation process is often applied to new concepts, to fuse pre-existing concepts, or to make older expressions sound more current. For example advertisement is shortened to advert.Neologism or Coinage this is creation of an entirely new word. It is a very common practice in the English language.
For example motel which combines motor and hotel. Blending this is quiet akin to compounding, but is distinctly characterized by taking only parts of words and joining them. These are Compounding this is a method in which two different words are joined together to refer to one thing.įor example earthquake is a compound made out of two words earth and quake, but it does not refer to two things, it refers to one object only. In other words word formation is the creation of a new word (The study of language.)1 There are several word formation processes that are common not only for the English language but are also very similar in a majority of majority of languages. Word Formation in EnglishWord Formation is a process by which new words are formed out of words by various means like of affixation, compounding, clipping, acronym etc.